Book Review: ‘Beautiful Days,’ by Zach Williams

BEAUTIFUL DAYS: Stories, by Zach Williams

“You don’t have to be very smart to write a review of a book of short stories,” John Edgar Wideman wrote in a short story of his own. “All you need to say is that some stories in the book are better than others.”

Well, touché, I suppose. Collections of stories are tasting menus. Gogol thought of his novels this way, too. He solicited criticism from friends by giving them a manuscript and asking them to imagine he was running the kitchen of a grand European hotel, with “20 dishes on my table.” Surely some dishes you will like less, Gogol would say. Tell me about those.

Zach Williams’s first collection of stories, “Beautiful Days,” is on my table now. Some of the stories in it are better than others! But two or three are so good that they announce a genuine young talent, one who deftly palpates the dark areas of human psyches.

Williams grew up in the suburbs of Wilmington, Del., and is a lecturer at Stanford, where he previously held a Wallace Stegner fellowship.

He frequently draws from the common myth-kitty. Like Gabriel García Márquez and Stephen King, among others, Williams understands how unnervingly intense and unknowable children can be. Like J.G. Ballard, he savors postapocalyptic vistas. Like George Saunders, he gets cosmic mileage out of tour guides. Like Joshua Ferris, he micro-observes office life. As in David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet,” sometimes there are weird men in his closets. He knows how ominous certain rental houses can feel.

But he is his own writer. His sentences are smooth, clean and approachable. He pushes you slowly off into the night, then down long embankments. “Psychological horror” is too neat a label for his work, but it fits loosely. He has a talent for unreliable narrators. He gets you on their side, then turns the tables, leaving you feeling complicit — and awful.

There are 10 stories in “Beautiful Days.” Two have appeared in The New Yorker, and one in The Paris Review. His best are tightly wound. His longer stories can shuffle slowly off toward nowhere, in the manner of Joe Biden after a late-period campaign speech.

“Trial Run” is set in a Manhattan office building during a snowstorm. Most people have stayed home. Pale gray emergency lights flicker inside. One employee, the narrator, shows up anyway because his own power is out.

Against his will, he is sucked into a conversation with another employee who is there, a furtive loner named Shel whom everyone avoids. Shel needs a shoulder to lean on; he wants to talk about the collapsing plaster that is his life.

“I saw I’d been defeated,” the narrator thinks about opening himself up to Shel. “He’d insinuated me into his life. Countless trips to the kitchenette, hundreds of elevator rides, so much would be spoiled by this.” The longer they talk, to the narrator’s dismay, the more attributes (loneliness, anger, perversity) they appear to have in common.

“Trial Run” messed with my mood. I turned on an extra light in the living room. The story is set amid lockdown drills and heavy security, at least since “the mass shooting at Rantr the previous spring.” Conspiracy theories drift in the air. Threatening emails, seemingly in response to D.E.I. programs, fill people’s inboxes. But Williams’s tone remains cool.

“Wood Sorrel House,” perhaps the most evocative story, takes place in a modest but idyllic rental house in the woods, where a couple and their young son have come to stay. Before long, they realize they can’t remember how they got there. Where is their car? Why does the food stock itself? Why does their son, Max, never grow older or feel pain?

The details, like the “daisy-papered” cabinet drawers and the molted antlers employed as book ends, are spot on. Max is one the scariest children I’ve encountered in fiction in recent years. This story took me back to when I was in eighth grade and reading wholly for narrative pleasure. Also: I like rental houses in the woods, and this scenario now hangs in my mind like a bat.

“Ghost Image” is the most Ballardian of these stories. There are glimpses of a closed and near-abandoned Disney World, with garbage everywhere, wildfires in the distance and menacing packs of people roaming the sidewalks. The slogan “Where Dreams Come True” has been defaced so that dreams screw you instead.

The narrator, in a spiritual crisis, begins to remake Thomas Kinkade paintings, which might be scarier than an abandoned Disney World. Small surrealisms fleck the storytelling. He loathes his son and begins to blend the son’s identity with that of other men.

The fatuity of modern work is among Williams’s themes. Dignity is hard to come by in the outsourced world. One man is a video-game streamer. Another makes pixel art, even though he has little talent. Others have remote programming gigs or work mindless jobs in business parks or write freelance ad copy. When one lands a well-paying job, it’s with Spotify, doing surveillance work.

The generation coming up behind scares these characters even more. About a roommate, one thinks:

If the years between Bradt and me seemed unbridgeable, what would the generation behind his be? It was hard to imagine they’d still be human — I pictured something like a waving blue bed of sea anemones.

In “Mousetraps,” a man goes shopping for a humane trap and is morally undone by the employees of an old hardware store. Is he aware how much a mouse can suffer if left in a “humane” trap? What kind of a man is he, anyway? The questioning grows increasingly existential.

In “The New Toe,” a baby suddenly grows a sixth toe and the mother debates reaching for wire cutters. In “Golf Cart,” a pair of young men living on a historic and sprawling estate outside Philadelphia mount a counterattack on the neighbors who’ve been driving ATVs and pickup trucks on their property. The story contains casually good writing about, of all things, the Grateful Dead.

Two or three very good stories might not sound like much. But if he can keep that percentage up for two or three more collections, we might be staring before long at “Selected Stories of Zach Williams.”

BEAUTIFUL DAYS: Stories | By Zach Williams | Doubleday | 222 pp. | $28